Features

The Core: Robert Randolph

Photo by Danny Clinch

Career Reassessments
Sometimes you have to take time and think about the next phase of your career—where you’re going, what you want to accomplish. We started working on [ We Walk This Road ] at the beginning of 2008. Our last record [2006’s Colorblind ] had a lot of great songs and we worked with a lot of up-and-coming producers and songwriters. For this record, we wanted to make a thematic record and get back to working with some of these old gospel songs. On our first few albums, we took songs that sounded like something my grandmother made up in church and added this rock and roll mentality to them. At the same time [as we started working on the new record], our drummer, my cousin Marcus Randolph, got sick and was in the hospital for about seven or eight months. He had kidney failure and they had to treat him and do a lot of different things. It took him out of commission for almost the whole year.

T-Bone Knows Best
[After we started talking to producer] T-Bone Burnett, he had the idea to find those field recordings—old blues, old gospel—and make this Robert Randolph & The Family Band and friends record. He told us all these great stories about working with Dylan and how Led Zeppelin would listen to all these old blues records and say, “Well, let’s take that and turn it into something that sounds like us.” We started out with all these basic jams and the next thing you know we’re all sitting down with a pad of paper and writing choruses and verses.

Back to Basics
T-Bone said to us, “I’m not trying to turn you guys into some pop band. I bet you the Grateful Dead didn’t think about trying to be like anybody else, Dylan didn’t think about trying to be like anybody else.” Sometimes you’ve got to explore and then you’ve got to get back—everybody drifts off, veers in another direction—but the most important thing is when are you coming back? We didn’t go too far away from what we did early on, and not to discredit Colorblind, but it was a different process. I got to do a lot of TV and radio— 30 Rock [Randolph made a guest appearance on the TV show in last year]. [The album’s popularity got me] talking to Elton John and all these guys in their sixties or seventies. [I realized] what they dug about me was that there is only one of me, that what me and my band are doing is unique.

Keeping the Faith
People from our church in New Jersey told us, “You guys can’t leave, you can’t do this and the next thing.” But I think one of the great things [about getting this music into the secular world] is being able to be out of the box that we were in, which is a box that nobody should ever be in. God has a plan for every one of us. So this musical journey—to be able to go out and be able to be influenced so many different younger musicians—it’s a great feeling to be in that position.

Sister Act
My sister [Lenesha Randolph] has been playing with us for the past few years. She went to high school with Lauryn Hill and sings on her records. That’s what’s great about this record—being able to bring in and play with all these different musicians we have worked with or played with. We brought in all these guests—sometimes just to hang with in the studio. I was texting Ben Harper one day and asked him to come down. Next thing you know, Ben Harper just jumped up, goes in the booth and murders, “If I Had My Way.”